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Gerta Keller is a Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, where she has been a tenured faculty member since 1984. She has placed over 260 scientific publications in international journals and is considered a leading authority on catastrophes, mass extinctions, and the biotic and environmental effects of impacts and volcanism. She has coauthored five academic books, including Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, Chicxulub and the KTB Mass Extinction in Texas, and Micropaleontology and Stratigraphy: Global Bioevents in Earth's History. She is a frequent lecturer and regularly receives invitations from academic institutions around the world. In recent years, her work has received increased recognition and continues to make waves in the mainstream media, including TV documentaries and news features, radio and podcast interviews, as well as print and web media, most notably in a widely circulated profile in The Atlantic.
Gerta Keller's website
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What do most people think caused the dinosaurs to become extinct?
If you ask a random person on the street, there's a very good chance they'll say it was an asteroid. Impact theory is the popular, albeit incorrect, belief that an asteroid crashed into Yucatan, Mexico, and caused the mass extinction of about 70% of the species 66 million years ago. This belief was first promoted in 1980 when Nobel Prize physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter claimed the presence of the rare earth element Iridium proved the impact theory. This conclusion was always doubtful, but few scientists dared to question Iridium's origin. And so, Iridium remained the unquestioned elephant in the room of impact theory for decades.
By 2017, I had almost given up hope of finding the true source of the Iridium anomaly. In early February of that year, I lectured in Tallahassee, Florida, where I met an astrochemist, which is a person who knows the chemistry of asteroids. He was also an "impactor," which means he firmly believed in the impact theory. But he was open-minded and ready to investigate the evidence we had found, which indicated that the Iridium had instead come from volcanic eruptions in India—and had surfaced from deep within ...
Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Last Extinction
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Eve
by Cat Bohannon
Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and ... (more)
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by Walter Isaacson
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